Huan Ni_ Campus of the Future_v2

Radical Pedagogies

Innovation, instability and Emergence

Huan (Sophie) Ni

Campus of the Future

“In ancient Greece, a paid-agogus or pedagogue was a leader of the young. But for an aspiring ‘radical’ pedagogue, educating involves more than leading, and learning involves more than being led. A radical pedagogy involves stepping away from orthodox practices 9 and revisiting the real – and surreal – fundamentals of what and whom an education is for, and who delivers it”, in the book Radical Pedagogies: Architectural Education and the British Tradition, Daisy Fround & Harriet Harriss suggests there are many trajectories that may continue to achieve the academic, social and practical complexity separating architecture from building.

What architecture was and how will it look like in the future.

[the] ‘…globalised architect must become more than just an artful vision - ary, but also master of the art of the political nudge willing to act in multiple mediums and the simultaneous scales of the chaotic new world disorder’

Architecture education contains teaching, administration and research. Whilst educators are always asking how to make architectural education better, today’s educators and students are facing a more critical problem: ‘better’ does not address the initial challenges. Thus, we need to do not only just accept and compliance the established and existing system. In the book, the author mentions ‘to teach, to live.’ It means architecture schools need to constantly and continuously experiment, practice, adapt, reinvent, critique and contribute. It should celebrate with intellectually restless environments created by schools of architecture to reinvent the discipline.

Learning, studying and teaching are not limited in one’s own major, all majors in one building should be collaborated with others. Campus is a whole, a building is also a whole. If we are certain and crave in how architecture schools teach, we should accept that complete coherence at the outset of any new initiative is no guarantee of intellectual progression. Thus, in Taubman college, architecture, art and sculpture may be merged, intertwined with each other to form a new type of pedagogies. The duration of education means invention, creation of forms and continuous elaboration of the absolutely new. Architecture education is not an exception. Students in the same building should not be separated by majors. They can start to share the same classrooms, to more easily take other major’s classes, to communicate more with students and educators in other majors in Taubman college.

“Rather than waiting for the sky to fall, schools have an opportunity to embrace other forces of transformation”, the building already bring students in architecture, art, sculpture to one place, why spate them from the disciplines.